eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

11/22/2018

“I had started on a path of awareness.”

Educated by Tara Westover REVIEW

This is a story of a mind, like a fugitive slave making its way to Canada through an underground railroad called “education.” Tara Westover’s domineering father and his religion-fueled empire of certainty provides the “Iron Curtain” from behind which Tara must escape as a child, a teenager, and a young adult. It is a fascinating story full of courage, hope, despair, and loss. Educated should be read by everyone who spends their life educating, being educated, - or anyone who has ever had a family or plans to have one.

“This story is not about Mormonism,” Tara Westover says in her preface, acknowledging that it was not her father’s religion so much as his mental condition and sense of certainty that had made it so difficult for her to individuate.

“Neither is it about any other form of religious belief. In it there are many types of people, some believers, some not; some kind, some not. The author disputes any correlation, positive or negative, between the two.”

In other words, she seems to be arguing that it is not religion that created a father like this. It was a father like this that created an expression of a particular religion. One senses throughout the book that the levers of parental control were seldom left untouched. Repetition, certainty, an appeal to divine sanction, modeling, coercion, shaming, threats, conditional care, dishonesty, outright violence, intimidation, suggestions of potential abandonment, and a host of other mechanisms of thought control make it seem as though Tara’s resistance and escape are unlikely. Any hope that she might have would have to come from her mother and as the story unwinds, that becomes less and less likely. Tara’s father’s ideology is doubly potent. He does not only assert his authority frequently, it always comes with a divine sanction. And he does not simply vie for partial agreement. His expectations are totalitarian. And if this was not enough, he provides a constant stream of accusation against any and all potential detractors.

“There’s two kinds of them college professors,” the author’s father says to her brother when the young man suggest that he might want to go to school,

“Those who know they’re lying, and those who think they’re telling the truth. Don’t know which is worse, come to think of it, a bona fide agent of the Illuminati who at least knows he’s on the devil’s payroll, or a high-minded professor who thinks his wisdom is greater than God’s.”

“A son of mine, standing in line to get brainwashed by socialists and Illuminati spies,” he exclaims incredulously, making it clear that disagreement is defection and defection is worthy only of familial abandonment. And yet this moment of her brother’s liberation is essential to Tara’s own attempt to overcome her double difficult escape (in the Westover form of Mormonism, girls have no natural reason to go to a school, much less a college). “It happens sometimes in families,” Tara writes of her older brother’s declaration of independence, “one child who doesn't fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler.”

… until it was her.

Tara is raised in a junkyard basically. Her parents believe that public schools are tools of government propaganda and that government is an expression f Satanic control. Her father prepares for the apocalypse in whatever way he can. He has disdain for anyone who goes to a hospital or sees a doctor. He dismisses all safety precautions that might be normal in a scrap yard and particularly one with children working in it. Children are not immunized. They have angels. “God and his angels are here working alongside us” he says when Tara suggests taking some measure of precaution against injury. Everyone in the community is either “us” or “them.” If your kids go to a school, if your daughters dress immodestly, if you take medicine instead of using herbal remedies with faith, you are “them.” “Herbals operate by faith,” her father insists, “You can’t put your trust in a Dr. and then ask the Lord to heal you.” When her brother sustains a severe head injury in a motorcycle accident, Tara’s father insists on bringing him home and not taking him to a hospital. “Your mother can handle it,” he says. If an appeal is made to her mom, it is met with a counter-strike, “A man should be able to expect support for his wife,” her dad insists.

If someone falls off a roof in the middle of a construction project, it is not because some safety measures were not insisted on. It is because “God wanted him to fall.” “I am not driving faster than our angels can fly,” her father argues when driving at break-neck speed through a snow storm. The Westover home looked forward to the collapse of the state the night of Y2K. “I had always known that my father believed in a different God,” Tara writes,

“ … They [other Mormons in town] believed in modesty. We practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal. We left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the second coming. We actually prepared.”

Ideological indoctrination is relentless, insistent, unavoidable. “Surrender your mind to the all knowing father and his God or find some other place to live” seems to be the message that all his children were given. The moment when Tara opts to take her brother to the hospital instead of taking him home is a pivotal one. It is the moment when she must decide between responsible love for her brother and obedience to her dad (a pretty wicked decision for any teenager to have to make). “There was an instinct at work in me – a learned intuition.” Tara says, of her attempt to follow out the two trajectories of her soul. “The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter,” she says of those first decisions. “I am a traitor – a wolf among sheep. There is something different about me. … I am not sorry. Merely ashamed.” She knows that she will be made to pay, and she does.

“Home had changed the moment I had taken Sean to that hospital. I had rejected some part of it. Now it was rejecting me.”

In a story about a wild owl her family tried to domesticate, she betrays her own situation. “It didn’t belong. It couldn’t be taught to belong.” “I had started on a path of awareness,” … she says and begins trying to figure out how a kid raised without school in a junk yard on the side of a mountain in Idaho can get into a college and pay for it all on her own. “I decided to experiment with normality” she says, “For 19 years I had lived the way my father wanted. Now I would try something else.”

One would think that this would be easy but no one who has ever been raised by parents who saw their way as God’s way is likely to agree. It is no easy thing to “live in your own mind and not in someone else’s” she discovers. “It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you,” one of her early college journals records. “I believed then and part of me will always believe that my father’s words ought to be my own.” The life she lived as a child “had a hold on her,” she admits, a hold that she might not ever break. She talks about how in trying to become herself, she often felt like not herself – having never been allowed to have a self before. “I felt alienated from myself. I didn’t know who to be,” she says. And then … she begins to create a self as a response to her education. “First find out what you are capable of,” one of her teachers tells her, “Then decide who you are.”

This is not a message she ever received at home.

The psychological process of rebuilding a self at the age of 19 is a messy, tangled, disorienting thing to watch unfold. “Its astonishing that I used to believe all this without the slightest suspicion” she will say to herself of some of her fathers more outlandish notions. And, “Although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one.” Her education has moments of resistance and regression as when she says something like “I knew my yearning was unnatural” or “My dreams were perversions” and then it will have moments of transcendence and radical reframing, as though tectonic plates in the substructure of her personality just shift - as in the moment when she reads John Stewart Mill say “Of the nature of women, nothing final can be known” or hears the lyrics of a song that practically chisels the chains off her mind.

Soon, the tell-tale signs of her liberation can be felt throughout her life. “My life had diverged from my sisters …” she notes on one visit back from school. “We stared at each other and I contemplated the distance between us” she says of her father on one these visits to the family home. “I could admire the past without being silenced by it” she says when on a trip to Rome with friends at Cambridge (where she obtained a scholarship to study History). Of those friends, she writes, “Sometimes I felt damned for those feelings. … I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given.”

“I had built a new life …” she says as she narrates the painful experience of losing her family (or most of it.

The chapter in which she details her father’s attempt to bring her back into the fold (or into his empire) is particularly excruciating as it almost literally strangles you with her dilemma. “All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs and I could have my family,” she says of her parents. All that was needed was to trade her own reality for theirs and let them take over the job of constructing her mind. “If I yielded now,” she says in describing that moment,

“I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. … What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon. It was me.”

Tara Westover’s book asks everyone who has ever had a family that cared about who they grew up to be profound questions. “What is a person to do when their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations - to friends, to society, to themselves?” And “Is the first shape a person takes, their only true shape?”

Clearly, if she can become someone she was not raised by her parents to be, we all can - If this is what we wish.

Question for Comment: How much more or less freedom to construct their own selves were your children given relative to what you were given?